Wednesday, 16 October 2013

Any good SF world must be understood as a possibility space. A universe which is characterized first and foremost by its physics:
By what is and isn't possible, and by how easy (or difficult) each of these non-impossible things are to do.

Once you have created the possibility space, you must extrapolate how the people in the world will exploit the possibilities. Because, you know, they're people. They are going to exploit it. Some of them, at least. That's what people are like.

I'll mostly be talking about science fiction in this post, but the principles I refer to are eminently applicable to fantasy as well.

Wednesday, 25 September 2013

And I've decided to not let the slow progress of the final part of the Elfland article series, the bibliography (in 3 parts), prevent me from writing other blog posts.

I'm still determined to write those finishing articles for Elfland, but it's slow going, and I'm in the mood to allow myself to write other blog posts too, in parallel with working on the Bibliography articles.

Note, though, that I have in mind giving Nanowrimo a try this year, so there's absolutely no guarantee of more posts soon, whether Elfland or otherwise.

Wednesday, 12 June 2013

In this entry, I'll mostly talk about five of his science fiction novels, "Consider Phlebas", "Player of Games", "Use of Weapons", "Against a Dark Background" and "The Algebraist. The first three, as well as most of his later SF novels, take place in Banks' "Culture" universe, named after a humanoid post-scarcity communist utopia(although personally I'm more and more inclined to try to coin/promote the phrase post-maslowian, because "post-scarcity" gets very strong reactions from some people, and is also somewhat misleading).

If you just want to know where to start with his works, and want to read the rest of this blog at a later time, the standard recommendation, which I support, is to begin with either "Consider Phlebas" or "Player of Games" (the later available in a tolerable Danish translation).